Ordinary WiFi can now identify you with near-perfect accuracy

toomuchtodo

Are there any projects or products today available for monitoring heart rate and respiration without needing a smart watch using this technology?

upboundspiral

Unless we get legislation passed that bans this use in public and private spaces prepare for this to be combined with Flock et al to track your movements inside your house (already is being tested by some internet providers), track the moment you exit your house, track you along your route, track you inside all the business you visit. Unless we do something, this will be used to covertly break the fourth amendment.

close04

> These signals, known as beamforming feedback information (BFI), are transmitted without encryption, meaning that anyone within range can potentially read them. > By analyzing that information, the system can generate images of people from multiple viewpoints. Those images can then be used to determine a person's identity. This is the extent of the description of the magic sauce. Why are those images so unique that you can’t trick the algorithm? I can’t think of any EM based identification that can’t be tricked by adding layers of reflectors or absorbers in various points - a mask, special paint, etc.

mmooss

> "By observing the propagation of radio waves, we can create an image of the surroundings and of persons who are present," Notice that it doesn't matter if you are using Wifi. If you're in a city, I doubt there are many places that lack Wifi radio waves. Thank you to the researchers (seriously) for revealing this to the public rather than selling it to the highest bidder. Though I suspect that, given how obvious it is once you think about it - all these radio waves solve many problems of passive imaging - it's already known to some people.

mmooss

For those seeking the source: > The researchers presented their results at the "ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security" (CCS) in Taipei. This citation at the bottom might be the paper: Julian Todt, Felix Morsbach, Thorsten Strufe. BFId: Identity Inference Attacks Utilizing Beamforming Feedback Information. , DOI: 10.1145/3719027.3765062

Shadowmist

How do I wire this to Home Assistant?

neom

Paper: https://publikationen.bibliothek.kit.edu/1000185756/16810098...

im3w1l

I'm personally bearish on privacy. As the cost of surveillance comes down we will see more and more actors able to conduct surveillance until even bored kids with pocket money and an afternoon can do it. Denying the """good""" guys the capabilities that all the bad guys have will be an absurdity. We will simply have to adapt to it.

hollow-moe

Can't wait to see clothes with some thin metal wires knitted with the fabric acting like a Faraday cage or disturbing the signal enough to blur the results

thataccount

I came from the era before WiFi. One doesn't HAVE to have WiFi. Everybody keeps thinking they do. Same thing with cell phones. The world existed before all that, and it can exist just fine again without it.

iamnothere

Good time to invest in companies that make (extremely expensive) RF shielding paint and fine wire mesh.

newsclues

Wifi and cellular signals are how the military hunts and kills terrorists. Sounds like the perfect AdTech! /s

OrderlyTiamat

> almost 100% accuracy I think it's annoying that this gets repeated without revealing the actual stats: this is for the BFI test, it's 99.5% ± 0.38, where 40 samples per person were split 80-20 in training and testset. paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3719027.3765062

ranger_danger

No it can't. I'm sorry but this article is quite sensationalist and is twisting their words around. What we can do is identify that a person-like object exists in a room, not necessarily Sally Jones from 123 Main St, as they try to imply by saying they are "able to infer people's identities with almost 100% accuracy." What they're claiming is science fiction.

throw0101a

Worth noting the existence of IEEE 802.11bf: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiFi_Sensing

ortusdux

I learned about RECCO tags recently, which are RFID tags designed for finding people in avalanches. I wonder if the return signal contains any information or is fingerprintable? https://recco.com/technology/